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Before yesterday, Riley would have thought she’d misheard him. Now she went looking for zebras.
—
Riley counted eight zebras behind a fence. The gate to the enclosure was open, and they could have wandered off, so she guessed they were pretty content where they were. She turned right as directed, and the walkway led to a giant greenhouse. It was a glass and iron structure of intricate design with a big Victorian cupola on top. It looked to Riley like a massive crystal wedding cake.
The glass panes were shattered in spots, and vines grew through the gaps and wrapped themselves around the outside of the building as if they wanted to swallow it whole.
Walking through the open door, she heard the booming seventies funk music that she now associated with Emerson. The interior was humid and crammed with ferns, fruit trees, and flowering plants.
“Hello?” she called. “Mr. Knight?”
No answer. She punched his cell number into her phone, waited while it connected, and heard the phone ringing somewhere on the other side of the jungle. She cautiously crept along the stone path, brushing ferns aside, keeping a watchful eye out for spiders and lizards. She reached an open area that had two pretty white wrought iron benches and a small table. Emerson was sitting cross-legged on the table, eyes closed, his mind obviously somewhere far away.
Riley sat down on one of the benches and watched Emerson. He didn’t seem to be breathing, but he was most likely not dead since he hadn’t toppled off the table. She checked her email on her cellphone and organized her messenger bag. She went back to watching Emerson and decided he had a nice mouth. Sensuous. And she’d kill for his thick black lashes. Too bad he was so weird. Not that it mattered to her date-wise because she’d decided to put that part of her life on hold while she got a grip on her career. She checked her watch. It was almost eight o’clock. She could have slept an extra half hour.
She leaned forward. “Excuse me? Mr. Knight?”
He didn’t respond so she picked a couple kumquats off a nearby tree and pitched them at him. The first one sailed past his ear. The second bounced off his forehead. He opened his eyes, stretched, and came off the table.
“The Siddhar sends his salutations.”
“The Siddhar?”
“Yes. Thiru Kuthambai Siddhar, the nineteenth to bear that exalted title. I’ve studied with him from time to time on Nancowry Island, a tiny spot of land in the northeast Indian Ocean between the Bay of Bengal and the Andaman Sea. Now that my responsibilities dictate that I live here, I’ve had to discontinue my studies with the Siddhar, but I still commune with him every morning.”
“Astral projection?”
“Skype.”
Riley wasn’t sure if she was relieved or disappointed. “I thought maybe you were talking to him while you were on the table.”
“That was a simple yoga relaxation exercise. I find it helpful to periodically clear my mind.”
“An excellent use of time,” Riley said. “After you get it empty you can pick and choose the information you want to put back in.”
“Precisely.”
“I was kidding,” Riley said.
Emerson snatched a gray sweatshirt off the floor, shook it, and a lizard fell out. “I wasn’t. That’s why you’re here. To collect and preserve all the worthless bits and pieces of information deemed too insignificant to be returned to my brain.”
“Now you’re kidding,” Riley said.
“Yes, now I’m kidding, although there is an element of truth to it.” He slipped the sweatshirt on over his navy T-shirt and grabbed his rucksack. “Come along, Miss Moon. We’ll take the Mustang this time. Larry used to like to drive the Mustang on weekends.”
“I’m not Larry and this isn’t the weekend.”
“More’s the pity,” he said, and he disappeared behind the ferns.
—
Emerson’s Mustang was a green ’68 GT Fastback, just like the one Steve McQueen drove in Bullitt. For all Riley knew, it was the one McQueen drove. Talk at her parents’ dinner table was that McQueen always regretted not driving the Mustang off the set and keeping it for himself. He’d searched for years and never found it, so who was to say where the car resided.
Riley drove the car off the property and headed south through Rock Creek. This was a muscle car, like her father’s GTO, and it felt good to be behind the wheel.
“Where are we going?” she asked Emerson.
